The MS St. Louis was a German ocean liner most notable for a single voyage in 1939, in which her captain, Gustav Schröder, tried to find homes for 915 Jewish refugees from Germany, after they were denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada, until finally accepted in various European countries, which were later engulfed in World War II. Historians have estimated that, after their return to Europe, approximately a quarter of the ship's passengers died in concentration camps. The event was the subject of a 1974 book, Voyage of the Damned, by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts. It was adapted for a 1976 American film of the same title.

The St. Louis set sail from Hamburg to Cuba on May 13, 1939. The vessel under command of Captain Gustav Schröder was carrying 937 refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution.[2][3] Upon the ship's arrival in Cuba, the Cuban government, headed by President Federico Laredo Brú, refused to accept the foreign refugees. Although passengers had previously purchased legal visas, they could not enter Cuba either as tourists (laws related to tourist visas had recently been changed) or as refugees seeking political asylum. On May 5, 1939, four months before World War II began, Havana abandoned its former pragmatic immigration policy and instead issued Decree 937, which "restricted entry of all foreigners except U.S. citizens requiring a bond of $500 and authorization by the Cuban secretaries of state and labor. Permits and visas issued before May 5 were invalidated retroactively."[4] None of the passengers were aware that the Cuban government had retroactively invalidated their landing permits.

The journey to Cuba was a joyous affair. The passengers aboard the St. Louis were "treated with contempt before they boarded, but once on the ship they were treated like privileged tourists."[5] "Crew members treated the passengers well—Captain Schröder insisted on this. Elegantly clad stewards served foods that by 1939 had been rationed in Germany; there was a full-time nursemaid to care for small children when their parents sat to eat. There were dances and concerts, and the captain allowed passengers to hold Friday evening religious services in the dining room and even permitted them to throw a tablecloth over a plaster bust of Hitler that sat there. Children were given swimming lessons in the on-deck pool. Passengers felt that they were, in the words of Lothar Molton, a boy traveling with his parents, on 'a vacation cruise to freedom'".[6]

The ship dropped anchor at 4 A.M. on May 27 at the far end of the Havana harbor and was denied entry to the usual docking areas. The next six days on the harbor were tumultuous times. It was finally announced that passengers arriving on the ship would only be allowed to enter if they had official Cuban visas.[7] Thus, only 22 non-Jewish passengers were allowed to disembark on Cuban shores. After long negotiations, the remaining 915 passengers (mostly Jewish) were forced to return to Europe.[8]

Prohibited from landing in Cuba, Captain Schröder took the ship and its passengers to Florida. It is not known why Schröder did not proceed to the Dominican Republic, whose officials at the Evian Conference in July 1938 offered to accept 100,000 Jews. Some histories recount that on June 4, 1939, Schröder believed he was being prevented from trying to land St. Louis on the Florida shore. Material from that time was conflicting. According to the authors Rabbi Ted Falcon & David Blatner in Judaism for Dummies, when the "St Louis was turned away from Cuba … America not only refused their entry but even fired a warning shot to keep them away from Florida's shores".[10] Legally the refugees could not enter the United States on tourist visas, as they had no return addresses. The U.S. had passed the Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted numbers of "new" immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.

Schröder said he circled off the coast of Florida after leaving Cuba, hoping for permission to enter the United States. At one point, he considered running aground along the coast to allow the refugees to escape. He was shadowed by US Coast Guard vessels that prevented such a move. US Coast Guard historians maintain the two cutters involved were not ordered to turn away St. Louis but dispatched "out of concern for those on board".[11] Ultimately the United States did not provide for entry of the refugees.[11]

As the St. Louis was turned away from the United States, a group of academics and clergy in Canada tried to persuade the nation's Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to provide sanctuary to the ship's passengers, as it was only two days from Halifax, Nova Scotia.[12] But, Canadian immigration officials and cabinet ministers hostile to Jewish immigration[who?] persuaded the Prime Minister on June 9 not to intervene.[13]

Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis while the ship was docked in Havana.

Captain Schröder,[14] the commander of the ship, was a non-Jewish German who went to great lengths to ensure dignified treatment for his passengers. He arranged for Jewish religious services and commanded his crew to treat the refugee passengers as they would any other customers on the cruise line. As the situation of the vessel deteriorated, he personally negotiated and schemed to find them a safe haven. (At one point he formulated plans to wreck the ship on the British coast to force the passengers to be taken as refugees.) He refused to return the ship to Germany until all the passengers had been given entry to some other country. US officials worked with Britain and European nations to find refuge for the travelers in Europe.[9] The ship returned to Europe, docking at Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17, 1939.[15]

The United Kingdom agreed to take 288 of the passengers, who disembarked and traveled to the UK by other steamers. After much negotiation by Schröder, the remaining 619 passengers were allowed to disembark at Antwerp; 224 were accepted by France, 214 by Belgium, and 181 by the Netherlands. Without any passengers, the ship returned to Hamburg. The following year, after the Nazi German invasions of Belgium and France in May 1940, all the Jews in those countries were at renewed risk, including the recent refugees.[16][17]

St. Louis Captain Gustav Schröder negotiates landing permits for the passengers with Belgian officials in the Port of Antwerp.

By using the survival rates for Jews in various countries, Thomas and Morgan-Witts, the authors of Voyage of the Damned, estimated that 180 of the St. Louis refugees in France, 152 of those in Belgium, and 60 of those in the Netherlands survived the Holocaust. Including the passengers who landed in England, of the original 936 refugees (one man died during the voyage), roughly 709 survived the war and 227 did not.[18][19]

"Of the 620 St. Louis passengers who returned to continental Europe, we determined that eighty-seven were able to emigrate before Germany invaded western Europe on May 10, 1940. Two hundred fifty-four passengers in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands after that date died during the Holocaust. Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis. Three hundred sixty-five of the 620 passengers who returned to continental Europe survived the war."[20]

Peter Gay's parents had booked passage on the boat, but impatient to depart, his father falsified tickets to embark on another ship, the Iberia, which landed two weeks earlier in Havana before the embargo was set in place that doomed the passengers on the St.Louis.

In 2011, a memorial monument called the Wheel of Conscience, was produced by the Canadian Jewish Congress, designed by Daniel Libeskind with graphic design by David Berman and Trevor Johnston.[22] The memorial is a polished stainless steel wheel. Symbolizing the policies that turned away more than 900 Jewish refugees, the wheel incorporates four inter-meshing gears each showing a word to represent factors of exclusion: antisemitism, xenophobia, racism, and hatred. The back of the memorial is inscribed with the passenger list.[23] It was first exhibited in 2011 at Pier 21, Canada's national immigration museum in Halifax. After a display period, sculpture was shipped to its fabricators, Soheil Mosun Limited, in Toronto for repair and refurbishment.[24]

The MS St. Louis was adapted as a German naval accommodation ship from 1940 to 1944. She was heavily damaged by the Allied bombings at Kiel on August 30, 1944, but was repaired and used as a hotel ship in Hamburg in 1946. She was later sold and was scrapped in 1952.[citation needed]